When you install Windows Server 2008 R2 and if you try to connect or search for a wireless network it wont be successful by default.

To connect your Windows Server 2008 R2 to a wireless network, you will need to enable a feature.

Open Server Manager => Click on Features => Add Features => enable Wireless LAN Service

Once the installation is done you will require to restart your server.

Central Administration in SharePoint 2007 is a separate web application which is attached to a site collection. This Site Collection consists of three sites. Namely,

1. Home
2. Operations
3. Application Management

Only the farm administrators have access to the central administration by default and how do you open central administration? click on Start => All Programs => Microsoft Office Server => SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration.

Central Administration is the place where you will be performing/configuring almost all your administrative tasks for a SharePoint environment.

From starting services to backing up and restoring your SharePoint servers will be done through this page.

Click here to view the list of all settings and configurations that are to be configured and accessed via Central Administration and its sites.

In addition to the above sites, the Central Administration will be hosting the Shared Services Provider settings as well. these are a common set of settings which will be shared across your SharePoint.

The above information was requested by a friend of mine and and suggested that I blog it. Thank you for your idea and i hope everyone who reads this will find it useful too.

I recently posted on the step by step guide on how to install Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. After installing MOSS 2007, MOSS automatically creates three web applications for you. These three Web Applications will be used as follows

1. For your Central Administration Page
2. For your Shared Services Provider
3. For your public/private site

Note: The above Web Applications are created automatically only when you do a basic installation. If you do a farm installation then you will have to manually create these Web Applications except for the Central Administration Web Application.

If you are planning to have the “My Site” functionalities in MOSS 2007 then you would be required as a best practice to create a Web Application for this.

Now, you might be wondering on what is this so called Web Application is? In Context with MOSS a Web Application is an IIS Web Site and was previously called as a Virtual Server in IIS. In fact Web Application were called Virtual Servers in WSS 2.0 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and then Microsoft released there server virtualization product named Virtual Server 2005 which made the IIS Virtual Server to be renamed as Web Application. So, as I said earlier a Web Application is an IIS Web Site which is an empty web service. you can host multiple Web Applications under a IIS Server with the help of Sockets. These Sockets are made out of a Port number, an IP and Host Name. The Public/Private site Web Application is what your users will be accessing as front end in order to browse your SharePoint Portal.

A Web Application can be created by going into the Central Administration page and under Application Management. Now you might be wondering, if it is a IIS web site then why should i create it through MOSS? Wouldn’t it be easier if I just go to the IIS Management Snap Console and create? The reason why you should create it through SharePoint is simply because, SharePoint will create with all the settings and configurations the way it wants. 

Next we will be looking at Site Collections,

Since a Web Application is an empty web service as I have mentioned earlier, you will have to create a Site Collection and attach it with the Web Application. A site collection is like a container or a folder or like an Organizational Unit inside the Active Directory. Under a single Web Application you can create multiple Site Collections depending on your requirement.

Inside a Site Collection you can have one or more sites and a site collection will share a common set features and functionalities between these sites. Usually inside a site collection you will have a hierarchy of sites, this hierarchy can be based upon your organizations requirement. It can be department based, project based, etc. Meaning, every department will have its own site/sub site.

Let’s look at an example. The Central Administration Page. The URL you type in in order to access will have a “http://hostname:port number” this can be considered as the Web Application under which you find the Central Administration Site Collection which hosts three sites namely, The Home page, The Operations page and the Application Management page.       

Every Site you create in MOSS will be based on a template and these templates will have unique settings and navigation options accordingly.

To create a Site Collection, you would have to visit the Central Administration and Operations page.

Alright, I think i should bring this post to an end now and I hope the above was useful and helpful to you. 

The Public Beta of Microsoft Office 2010 is out.. Anyone and Everyone can download and use from the following link

http://office.com/beta

System Requirements

Hardware

• 500 MHz 32-bit or 64-bit processor or higher
• 256 MB of system memory or more
• 3 GB of available disk space
• 1024×768 or higher resolution monitor
• DVD-R/W Drive

Software

One of the following Operating Systems

• Windows XP with Service Pack (SP) 3 (32-bit)
• Windows Vista with SP1 (32-bit or 64-bit)
• Windows Server 2003 R2 (32-bit or 64-bit)
• Windows Server 2008 with SP2 (32-bit or 64-bit)
• Windows 7 (32-bit or 64-bit)

Microsoft Office 2010 Beta has been released for TechNet / MSDN subscribers today.

Enjoy Downloading and using the BETA

From the following link download the e-book for free

Deploying Windows® 7 Essential Guidance 

Enjoy reading!

The following post is dedicated to a close friend who has a notebook which doesn’t have a DVD Drive.

If you look at the new mini laptops, which are used widely, it doesn’t come with a DVD drive, meaning to install Windows you will have to find another method, like an external DVD drive or network installation. But external DVD drive? this will cost money and network installation is trouble some as you will need to be in a network, What if you are a home user? Well, we have the answer for that use a USB drive to install Windows 7.

Using a Thumb Drive to install Windows 7 will be much faster than using a DVD. the thumb drive should be a minimum of 4GB in size and has to be formatted in a way that it can boot and install Windows 7. But before all these we have to make sure that your computer supports booting from USB

1. Open up Command Prompt in admin mode (right click command prompt and select run as administrator)
2. Type Diskpart (this is a utility which will help you partition your thumb drive and prepare it for bootable)
3. Type List Disk (this command will help you to find out the disks that are plugged in to your computer, if you have a single hard disk it will be disk 0 and the thumb drive you plugged in can be disk 1, but depends on the hard disk configuration of your computer.) I am going to assume your thumb drive is Disk 1.
4. Type Select Disk 1
5. Type Clean ( This will erase or wipe all your data which is in your thumb drive, so make sure you back it up)
6. Now you will have to create a partition by typing Create Partition Primary
7. Once you create a partition you will have  to type the following command Active to make the partition active.
8. Once the partition is marked as active, you will have to format the partition by typing format fs=fat32 quick (this will do a quick format)
9. As soon as you format it you will have to assign a drive letter by typing Assign
10. Once you execute the Assign command you will be able to see the thumb drive as normal USB storage drive in your my computer to which you will have to copy the Windows 7 setup files.

You are done boot your computer off your thumb drive and your installation will start.

Enjoy Installing Windows 7    

Bing! Microsoft’s new search engine which has a lot of new features and which turns out great search results. I have been using Bing from the day it was published and the search results have been improving tremendously from day one to until now. I have always wanted to grab those lovely pictures which the site hosts as the back ground image. Everyday you will find a new image which looks great.

I was browsing the web today and found this site which has almost all the pictures and you can visit the following site to browse through them

http://www.istartedsomething.com/bingimages   

Looks great and hope you will enjoy browsing the mages also.

If you want to subscribe for the Bing Images RSS feed, please do so by visiting the following

http://feeds.feedburner.com/bingimages

I used to write posts to my blog using the web browser or WordPress composer which is web based or at times type everything on a word document when ever i have time and then copy the whole thing to the blog. But recently a very good and close friend of mine who yet again is an “IT genius” and a “workaholic” introduced me to this wonderful piece of software called Windows Live Writer which is a component of the Windows Live Essentials. This is free and can be downloaded from the following link

http://download.live.com/

Easy to use and configure any of your blogs and you can  even have multiple blogs configured to it, so you can write to all your blogs without signing in. I take this post to thank my friend who eased my life…

Last week I had to conduct a training on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 for a Multinational organization. Usually I use a virtual image or a series of virtual images while conducting the training for the trainees to get the hands on touch and feeling about the product (I believe that the more hands on you get the more you will learn, rather than looking at a power point presentation).

Anyway, while preparing for this training, I had to install SharePoint from scratch and decided to post on the step by step procedure on how to install SharePoint 2007.

Prerequisites

• Windows Server 2003 with SP1 or higher
• Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0 and 3.0 or 3.5
• IIS
• SQL Server 2000 with SP3 or Higher or Express edition

Installation

Before installing SharePoint, you will have to install IIS, followed by .Net Framework 2.0 and 3.5. If you are installing SharePoint on a small or large farm, you will have to install SQL Server accordingly on your back end database servers. Here I will be using the built in Windows Internal Database (SQL Express Edition)

Let’s Start!

I Installed Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise edition and promoted it to a Domain Controller by running the DCPROMO.EXE command (since this is a lab environment i am going to install my SharePoint on my DC – Which is not recommended on a real environment).

I installed IIS, ASP.Net and followed by .Net Frameworks

As soon as you insert the SharePoint CD and run the setup.exe the first screen you will get is the screen to enter the product key. once you successfully enter the key you will be able to click continue  The next screen would ask you to accept the End User License Agreement (EULA) and if you don’t accept and agree you wont be able to move ahead

Next screen is one of the important screens where you will have to select your installation type, you have 2 options here, basic and advanced

Basic – (what i am going to use) – This will be a Standalone installation of SharePoint on a single server where you will have the DB also installed. This option will use the Windows Internal Database or the built in SQL Server Express Edition (MSDE) as the database.

Advanced – During the Advanced mode, SharePoint will prompt you 3 options

• Complete – This option will install everything that SharePoint got to offer you and I normally select this option when i have my SQL DB running on a separate server.
• Web Front End – If you have a SharePoint Server Farm you can select this option to add another web server which will be the front end to the users and will help to render service to the users who connect to MOSS
• Stand Alone – This is the same option as the Basic option

As you select on Basic the installation begins

As soon as the installation procedure is done you get a screen (below) which will ask to run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard. You can either run this now or at a later time by accessing it through the administrative tools. until you run this the installation will not complete. 

When you click close on the above screen (while the check box is enabled) you will get the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard welcome screen. Click Next

Note: if you had selected the Complete option above then you would be prompted to enter your DB Server settings, etc during this wizard process.

Once you click next on the Welcome screen it will prompt you, requesting permission to reset 3 of the services which are running

Click yes and the SharePoint Products and Technology Wizard starts. This will take some time (this is where all the SharePoint features and the administration website is created).

Once all 10 SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Tasks finishes, you will be prompted to click on finish

And you are done with the installation of SharePoint 2007.

Next, You will need to create Site Collections, Sites, Shared Services Provider, Start and Stop Services as necessary which i will write another time.